UPDATE: And the winner is…Rick Santorum.

The tiny minds of the flaccid stakeholders in the movement to control wombs and demonize the LGBT community met to agree upon which Clown in the GOP Clown Car to unite behind to take out Mittens.

If you follow the professional bigot brigade, the some of the 150 or so attendees at this event are familiar to you -

• Tony Perkins of the Southern Poverty Law Center hate-group designated organization the Family Research Council
• Richard Land, grand poobah of the Southern Baptists
• the decrepit Don Wildmon of the Mississippi-based gay bashing American Family Association
• Gary Bauer, failed 2000 presidential candidate (and failed flapjack flipper), head of Campaign for Working Families
• James Dobson, founder of (and shadow still prime mover of) Focus on the Anus Family.

They were invited to the ranch of Paul and Nancy Pressler near Brenham, Texas for this meeting, ostensibly to influence the outcome of the primary season for the Republicans, which is looking at this point mighty dim if nominating a fundie was the desired goal.

Mittens is, in these Dominionist minds: 1) not a reliable conservative; 2) Mormon; 3) candidate of the GOP mainstream, thus suspect; 4) a Mormon; 5) has been for, at one point or another — some gay rights, and in favor of reproductive freedom, and 6) a Mormon.

According to the Politico, originally Rick Perry was the clear favorite of this bunch, but as his campaign tanks rapidly, they were even willing to overlook serial adulterer Newt Gingrich’s myriad moral flaws:

Many of the individuals on the host list attended a previous closed-door session with Rick Perry this summer. But Perry’s candidacy stalled out, though he’s pledged to take his campaign on to South Carolina despite a disappointing fifth-place finish in Iowa.

Movement conservatives are concerned that a vote split between Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum among base voters could enable Mitt Romney to grab the GOP nomination. A source who shared the invitation said the meeting was about how to avoid such a possibility.

Bauer played coy, claiming it’s not a “Stop Romney” gathering, saying “There’s only one person I’m interested in stopping and that’s Barack Obama.” Jon Ward at the Huffington Post reported, however, that one rumored option was to push for Perry and Newt (!) to drop out so that they can get behind (no pun intended) Santorum.

“If in South Carolina Santorum outperforms Gingrich and outperforms Perry, then I would think that social conservative leaders could make the case, ‘You know, Mr. Gingrich, you’ve said that Mr. Santorum is a good friend of yours. You have similar views and you’ve been colleagues for many years. He is running better than you are. How about joining forces with him in Florida?’” Land said. “And then saying the same thing to Perry.”

“What I’ve heard over and over is we don’t want to make the same mistake this time that we did with Huckabee in 2008. People didn’t rally around Huckabee as the social conservative alternative because they didn’t think he could win, until it was too late and McCain had the nomination sewn up,” Land said.

UPDATE: Rick Santorum, despite a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the nomination, has been anointed the savior for the social conservative womb controllers and gay-haters. And they have not asked Newt or Perry to deep six their campaigns. (WaPo):

Former senator Rick Santorum has emerged as the choice of more than 150 evangelical leaders who huddled at a Texas ranch Friday night to debate their preferred candidate in the GOP presidential race.

But in a sign that the effort may be too little too late, the leaders did not discuss any plans to urge former House speaker Newt Gingrich or Texas Gov. Rick Perry to drop out of the White House race, according to one participant — meaning that social conservatives could well split their support this year, just as they did during the 2008 GOP presidential primary.

…“There was not a fear that this is too late; there was a sense that this could be exactly the right time,” he said, noting that evangelicals are a key voting bloc in South Carolina.

NPR gives time to hate organization propaganda machine

One of my main gripes with mainstream media is that they give way too much airtime to these professional haters, mostly because they spew fact-free misinformation, often quoting discredited “experts” like Paul Cameron. One of the main offenders in this area is Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association. Barbara Bradley Haggerty of NPR filed a report on the Texas gathering that extensively quoted Fischer.

“There is no perfect candidate,” says Bryan Fischer, director of issue analysis at the American Family Association. “Jesus Christ is not on the ballot in any of the primary elections, so that means social conservatives have to do triage.”

The mission of this “emergency meeting” is to unite behind one true-blue religious conservative for the Republican nomination. Fischer says evangelicals are desperate to defeat President Obama. But he does not believe former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — whom they distrust on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage — can generate the passion to do that.

“If Romney gets the nomination, his support is going be tepid, lukewarm, maybe even nonexistent,” Fischer says…”They’re going to come away and say, ‘Well, look, we’re not going to be able to come together and unite behind one candidate. So this is an issue that voters in South Carolina [on Jan. 21] and Florida [on Jan. 31] are going to have to decide for us,’ ” he says.

More below the fold.

One PHB reader was incensed by Fischer’s presence in the report, as the AFA is also a SPLC-designated hate group, particularly by the fact that the reporter seemed to be unaware of the organization’s reputation. This is how he recounts his conversation with Barbara Bradley Haggerty:

I called and got her on the phone. First off, what a jerk. I pointed out that AFA was a designated hate group and explained that after over 25 years of supporting NPR I was no longer continuing that support. I explained that while I support Mr. Fischer’s right to go into the public square and say what he wanted to say, I was NOT going to help purchase the microphone for hate group.

First, I could detect a hint of derision towards the SPLC. When I explained she had never indicated they were a designated hate group, she complained that the SPLC designated “a lot of groups as hate groups.” She basically said she was on a deadline, had put out about 20 calls, and Brian Fischer was the person who called her back. I asked why she didn’t interview the KKK about who they were supporting, and she said it wasn’t the same thing. That the AFA had millions of supporters and was very influential. I asked if she’d read some of the things Fischer had written and said about gay people. She said she had, but that was all.

Then she started defending her reporting, and I pointed out that she had never done a report about the AFA and the FRC when they were designated as a hate group, and that’s when she got all belligerent and said, “That’s because it’s ridiculous to designate the FRC as a hate group.” I asked if she’d ever read the things Tony Perkins and others at the FRC had said about gay people, and at that point she decided to tell me I was being abusive and that she was hanging up.